Digital Commons Network^™

Food Web Effects Of Lake Trout (Salvelinus Namaycush) Invasion In Northwestern Montana, Charles Wainright

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Around the turn of the 20th century, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) were widely introduced in several lakes and reservoirs outside their native range in western North America. Since then, lake trout have become problematic in many lakes where they were introduced, causing significant declines in popular sport fishes and native species, most notably federally protected bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus). Despite evidence that invasive fish can cause cascading trophic effects in aquatic communities, the impacts of lake trout introduction / invasion on aquatic food webs remain poorly understood. Moreover, native fish restoration programs tend to focus on suppression …

Temperature Effects On Moose (Alces Alces) Activity Patterns In Isle Royale National Park, Isabella C. Evavold

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Moose (Alces alces) in Isle Royale National Park impact the ecosystem by browsing tree species and serving as the primary food source for wolves. As a heat-sensitive species, moose are susceptible to the impacts of climate change in the southern extent of their range which includes Isle Royale. Understanding how temperature impacts moose behavior is valuable and can be used to predict how moose may respond to changing temperature in the future. GPS enabled radio-collars with three-axis accelerometers were used to collect one year of temperature and activity data from 6 cow moose in Isle Royale National Park. …

The Topographic Signature Of Ecosystem Climate Sensitivity In The Western United States, Zachary Hoylman, Kelsey Jencso, Jia Hu, Zachary A. Holden, Brady W. Allred, Solomon Z. Dobrowski, Nathaniel Robinson, Justin T. Martin, David L.R. Affleck, Carl Seielstad

Montana Climate Office Publications

It has been suggested that hillslope topography can produce hydrologic refugia, sites where ecosystem productivity is relatively insensitive to climate variation. However, the ecological impacts and spatial distribution of these sites are poorly resolved across gradients in climate. We quantified the response of ecosystem net primary productivity to changes in the annual climatic water balance for 30 years using pixel‐specific linear regression (30‐m resolution) across the western United States. The standardized slopes of these models represent ecosystem climate sensitivity and provide a means to identify drought‐resistant ecosystems. Productive and resistant ecosystems were most frequent in convergent hillslope positions, especially in …

Wild 485.01: Aquatic Invertebrate Ecology, Diana L. Six

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2016-2020

No abstract provided.

Fire On The Mountain: Impacts Of First-Year Burned Habitat On Wildlife Occupancy, Dakota Vaccaro

University of Montana Conference on Undergraduate Research (UMCUR)

Wildfires occur on a worldwide scale in a range of different environments and with varying levels of severity. Currently, wildfires are occurring on a higher frequency than in the past partly due to climate change. Fire ecology studies provide valuable management information that can be used to inform decisions. However, very few of these studies have been conducted on the impacts fire has on wildlife the year following a burn. Wildlife play an important role in keeping ecosystems healthy and functioning, therefore it is important to understand how they will react with increasing fire prevalence. This study focuses on wildlife …

An Assessment Of Fecal Water Contamination In The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, Daniel Paul Pendergraph 5024527

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Wilderness water sources are often defined as pristine or high quality due to the lack of point source pollution. Non-point source pollution from recreation to water resources can be extensive and is well-studied in protected areas globally. Bacterial contamination, specifically fecal bacteria, poses a significant threat to human health because of the risk for outbreaks of illness and disease. Water sources in designated Wilderness areas are particularly vulnerable to fecal water contamination due to high volume of backpackers and lack of backcountry waste facilities. To estimate the occurrence of fecal water contamination in Wilderness water resources, an exploratory analysis was …

Confronting The Challenges Of Whale Avoidance By Large Vessels To Reduce Collision Risk: A Quantitative Approach, Jennifer E. Helm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Disturbance of wildlife by human transportation infrastructure is ubiquitous. This type of human-wildlife conflict has the potential to negatively impact wildlife population growth rates, especially for at-risk species like large whales. While many whale populations are rebounding as a result of a moratorium on commercial whaling, increasing ship traffic constitutes a significant threat to whale conservation efforts in the form of ship-whale collisions (“ship strikes”). Ship strike avoidance is difficult because vessel operators can only see whales when they are breaking the surface of the water, or “available for detection,” and even then, they will only see them a fraction …

The Enduring Importance Of Wildness: Shepherding Wilderness Through The Anthropocene, Patrick Ram Kelly

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Wilderness and wildness have long been essential values at the heart of American conservation. Both have played critical roles in the formation of environmental ethics, providing a conceptual foundation for the belief that the non-human natural world is valuable for its own sake (Nash, 2001). After grounding and inspiring much of 20th century environmentalism, their influence in the current century has grown increasingly tentative. The arrival of what some have called the “Anthropocene epoch” – a term meant to capture the planetary scale impacts of human activity – now threatens the continued viability and relevance of wilderness and wildness to …

Ecology, Epidemiology, And Evolutionary Genetics Of Canine Distemper Virus Spillover In African Lions, Julie Kay Weckworth

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The impact of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) on the health and persistence of wildlife populations is an increasing conservation concern. Large carnivores are particularly vulnerable to EID impacts because they often occur in small, isolated populations with demographic and genetic challenges to long-term persistence. Ecological forces that isolate carnivore populations, e.g. agricultural intensification, simultaneously increase the probability of disease exposure from domestic species and can amplify population susceptibility to infection.

Canine distemper virus emerged as a conservation threat to African lions when an explosive epizootic caused the death or disappearance of a third of the Serengeti lion population in 1994. …

Annual Climate Impacts On Tree Growth And Post-Fire Regeneration In Ponderosa Pine And Douglas-Fir In The Northern Rocky Mountains, Lacey Hankin

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Widespread changes in climate and disturbance regimes, including prolonged drought and increases in the size and frequency of wildfires, have raised concerns regarding forest resilience to environmental change. Dry mixed-conifer forests have persisted for centuries under mixed-severity fire regimes; however, climatically driven increases in the frequency of large wildfires in recent decades may lead to increased tree mortality and declines in post-fire tree regeneration. Climatic warming and increased drought may also impact tree growth, with implications for the carbon cycle. Lower-treeline forests near the edge of their climatic tolerance may be particularly vulnerable to these impacts of future climate warming …

Managing Mining Pollution: The Case Of Water Quality Governance In The Transboundary Kootenai/Y, Ashley Juric

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis addresses current water quality management challenges in the transboundary Kootenai/y River Basin, and how these challenges are shaped by historical, economic, political, and social factors. The water quality of this basin, both in the United State and Canada, has been severely affected by coal mining that has occurred in British Columbia over the last hundred years and continues to be threatened by several proposed mining expansion projects. The goals of this research are to uncover the forces shaping water management and to determine the potential for interested and affected parties to participate in crafting water quality protection measures. …

Biotic Pulses, Bryotic Pulses And The Effects Of Mosses On Communities And Ecosystems, Mandy Lynn Slate

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Non-vascular mosses are known to be ecologically influential and structure communities through their physiological and physical attributes. My dissertation had two objectives. The first goal was to understand how fundamental differences in the physiology of mosses might drive much of their ecological impact. Mosses frequently and rapidly fluctuate between dehydration and rehydration. During these transitions, the cellular integrity of moss is compromised and intra-cellular contents (carbohydrates, amino acids, and ionic compounds) are released. Thus during wet-dry transition periods, mosses have the potential to release pulses of nutrients which may have important effects on other species. However, few studies have explored …

Conflicting Hydraulic Effects Of Xylem Pit Structure Relate To The Growth-Longevity Tradeoff In A Conifer Species, Beth Roskilly

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Consistent with a ubiquitous life history tradeoff, trees exhibit a negative relationship between growth and longevity among and within species. However, the mechanistic basis of this life history tradeoff is not well understood. In addition to tradeoffs among multiple traits based on resource allocation conflicts, life history tradeoffs may arise from tradeoffs based on single traits under opposing selection. While a myriad of factors likely contribute to the growth-longevity tradeoff in trees, we hypothesized that conflicting functional effects of xylem structural traits contribute to the growth-longevity tradeoff. We tested this hypothesis by examining the extent to which xylem morphological traits …

A Dynamic Landsat Derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (Ndvi) Product For The Conterminous United States, Nathaniel P. Robinson, Brady W. Allred, Matthew O. Jones, Alvaro Moreno, John S. Kimball, David E. Naugle, Tyler A. Erickson, Andrew D. Richardson

Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group Publications

Satellite derived vegetation indices (VIs) are broadly used in ecological research, ecosystem modeling, and land surface monitoring. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), perhaps the most utilized VI, has countless applications across ecology, forestry, agriculture, wildlife, biodiversity, and other disciplines. Calculating satellite derived NDVI is not always straight-forward, however, as satellite remote sensing datasets are inherently noisy due to cloud and atmospheric contamination, data processing failures, and instrument malfunction. Readily available NDVI products that account for these complexities are generally at coarse resolution; high resolution NDVI datasets are not conveniently accessible and developing them often presents numerous technical and methodological …

A Dynamic Landsat Derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (Ndvi) Product For The Conterminous United States, Nathaniel P. Robinson, Brady W. Allred, Matthew O. Jones, Alvaro Moreno, John S. Kimball, David E. Naugle, Tyler A. Erickson, Andrew D. Richardson

Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group Publications

Satellite derived vegetation indices (VIs) are broadly used in ecological research, ecosystem modeling, and land surface monitoring. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), perhaps the most utilized VI, has countless applications across ecology, forestry, agriculture, wildlife, biodiversity, and other disciplines. Calculating satellite derived NDVI is not always straight-forward, however, as satellite remote sensing datasets are inherently noisy due to cloud and atmospheric contamination, data processing failures, and instrument malfunction. Readily available NDVI products that account for these complexities are generally at coarse resolution; high resolution NDVI datasets are not conveniently accessible and developing them often presents numerous technical and methodological …

The Influence Of Tree Height On Lidar’S Ability To Accurately Characterize Forest Structure And Spatial Pattern Across Reference Landscapes, Haley L. Wiggins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Successful restoration of degraded forest landscapes requires reference models that adequately capture structural heterogeneity at multiple spatial scales. Field-based methods for assessing variation in forest structure are costly and inherently suffer from limited replication and spatial coverage. LiDAR is a more cost-effective approach for generating landscape-scale data, but it has a limited ability to detect understory trees. Increased understanding of appropriate height cut-offs for trees to be reliably included in LiDAR-based analysis could improve applications of LiDAR to assessments of landscape-scale forest structure. Toward that end, I investigated the effect of varying tree-height criterion (minimum height cutoffs of 6, 9, …

Enhancing Conservation With High Resolution Productivity Datasets For The Conterminous United States, Nathaniel Paul Robinson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Human driven alteration of the earth’s terrestrial surface is accelerating through land use changes, intensification of human activity, climate change, and other anthropogenic pressures. These changes occur at broad spatio-temporal scales, challenging our ability to effectively monitor and assess the impacts and subsequent conservation strategies. While satellite remote sensing (SRS) products enable monitoring of the earth’s terrestrial surface continuously across space and time, the practical applications for conservation and management of these products are limited. Often the processes driving ecological change occur at fine spatial resolutions and are undetectable given the resolution of available datasets. Additionally, the links between SRS …

Using Thermal Infrared Imagery To Estimate Soil Hydraulic Parameters: A Novel Approach, Matthew B. Thomas

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

In this study, skin temperature measured with a thermal infrared (TIR) camera was used to estimate soil hydraulic parameters. These physical properties that control how soils transport and retain water are notoriously difficult to measure in the field due to spatial variability. Laboratory experiments were set up to record surface skin temperature response in a clean soil column using a TIR camera after an artificial wetting event. An array of thermocouples, a net radiometer, heat flux sensor and weather station were used to constrain the TIR data and the energy budget during the experiment. The soil column surface was then …

A Biogeographic Perspective On The Impacts And Importance Of Rodent Granivory On Native Vs. Invasive Plants, Jacob Elias Lucero

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

One of the most well-known explanations for the success of invasive plants in novel environments is enemy release, which predicts that 1) invasive plants are limited by natural enemies in the native range but not the non-native range, and 2) native competitors in recipient communities remain limited by their natural enemies. Despite considerable empirical attention, very few studies have tested these basic predictions, especially with respect to generalist herbivores. We tested whether invasive cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) has experienced enemy release from granivorous rodents – an important guild of generalists – using exclosures and experimental seed additions in western Asia (where …

Utilization Of Landsat Imagery To Assess The Impacts Of Oil And Gas Extraction On The Tazovsky Peninsula, Siberia, Nicholas B. Kline

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Climatic warming of the Arctic is leading to landscape change through cascading biophysical feedbacks; development, such as oil and gas exploration and extraction, can accelerate or worsen these impacts. Due to restricted access to oil and natural gas fields, in situ environmental impact studies are only allowed in some regions. Satellite imagery analysis provides a mean for assessing impacts in areas with limited access. The Yamburg oil and gas field in western Siberia serves as a case study to assess the effects of infrastructure on an Arctic landscape.

This project quantifies the land-cover disturbance that occurred during the development and …

Ensc 551.01a: Environmental Field Study, Vicki Watson

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2016-2020

No abstract provided.

Performance Measures Of Road Crossing Structures From Relative Movement Rates Of Large Mammals, Adam Andis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In recent decades, there has been an increase of engineering projects that seek to mitigate the barrier effect roads impose on wildlife by installing wildlife crossing structures that promote permeability of the road corridor. The 41 fish and wildlife crossing structures installed along a 90km stretch of US Highway 93 on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, represent one of the most extensive of such projects in North America. As mitigation efforts are increasingly considered and implemented in road construction projects, the need to assess these structures’ effectiveness grows. This study is the first to compare observations of animal …

Remote Sensing Derived Fire Frequency, Soil Moisture And Ecosystem Productivity Explain Regional Movements In Emu Over Australia, Nima Madani, John S. Kimball, Mona Nazeri, Lalit Kumar, David L.R. Affleck

Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group Publications

Species distribution modeling has been widely used in studying habitat relationships and for conservation purposes. However, neglecting ecological knowledge about species, e.g. their seasonal movements, and ignoring the proper environmental factors that can explain key elements for species survival (shelter, food and water) increase model uncertainty. This study exemplifies how these ecological gaps in species distribution modeling can be addressed by modeling the distribution of the emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) in Australia. Emus cover a large area during the austral winter. However, their habitat shrinks during the summer months. We show evidence of emu summer habitat shrinkage due to …

Purpose And Satisfaction Of Activities In Rural Communities Using Ecological Momentary Assessment, Jennifer Lauren Wong

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Individuals’ wellbeing have been investigated through one of two primary perspectives, hedonic or eudaimonic. The hedonic perspective has focused on studying happiness and considers individuals’ maximization of their pleasurable moments as the pathway to happiness (Henderson & Knight, 2012). The eudaimonic perspective suggests that people should live a life of virtue and that actualizing their potential is the pathway to wellbeing (Henderson & Knight, 2012). Both perspectives have used retrospective recall to investigate individuals’ wellbeing. This method has given researchers a better understanding of individuals’ overall wellbeing, but is unable to describe their wellbeing as it varies throughout the day. …

Integrating Resource Selection Into Spatial Capture-Recapture Models For Large Carnivores, K. M. Proffitt, Joshua F. Goldberg, Mark Hebblewhite, R. Russell, B. S. Jimenez, H. S. Robinson, K. Pilgrim, M. K. Schwartz

Wildlife Biology Faculty Publications

Wildlife managers need reliable methods to estimate large carnivore densities and population trends; yet large carnivores are elusive, difficult to detect, and occur at low densities making traditional approaches intractable. Recent advances in spatial capture-recapture (SCR) models have provided new approaches for monitoring trends in wildlife abundance and these methods are particularly applicable to large carnivores. We applied SCR models in a Bayesian framework to estimate mountain lion densities in the Bitterroot Mountains of west central Montana. We incorporate an existing resource selection function (RSF) as a density co-variate to account for heterogeneity in habitat use across the study area …

Anty 400.01: History Of Anthropology, Richard A. Sattler

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2011-2015

No abstract provided.

Reproductive Performance Of Kittlitz's Murrelet In A Glaciated Landscape, Icy Bay, Alaska, Usa, Michelle L. Kissling, Scott M. Gende, Stephen B. Lewis, Paul Lukacs

Wildlife Biology Faculty Publications

Kittlitz's Murrelet (Brachyramphus brevirostris) is a dispersed-nesting seabird endemic to Alaska and eastern Russia that may have experienced considerable population declines in some parts of its range in the past few decades. Poor reproduction has been suggested as the demographic bottleneck, yet there are no direct estimates of reproduction in a glaciated area where this species reaches its highest densities at sea during the breeding season. The lack of demographic information in glacial habitats has limited our ability to interpret population trends and to clarify whether the presence of glaciers affects reproductive performance. Between 2007 and 2012, we …

Montana Kaimin, March 24, 2015, Students Of The University Of Montana, Missoula

Montana Kaimin, 1898-present

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.

Population Differentiation And Habitat Selection Of A Montane Red Fox Population In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Patrick Cross

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montane red fox (Vulpes vulpes) populations across the western United States are genetically and morphologically distinct from foxes at lower elevations. These montane populations also share a preference for subalpine forest habitats. One hypothesis is that they stem from boreal forest-associated ancestors that expanded during the Pleistocene when boreal forests extended farther south than they do today. Forest habitat selection may therefore aid the persistence of native populations surrounded by non-native conspecifics. Alternatively, this behavior may be an avoidance mechanism in response to competition with larger coyotes (Canis latrans), or a product of the fox's natural adaptability. The red fox …

Wolf-Cougar Co-Occurrence In The Central Canadian Rocky Mountains, Ellen Brandell

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Cougars and wolves are top carnivores that influence the dynamics of an ecosystem, including prey behavior and dynamics, and interspecific competition. Studies about the interactions between wolves and cougars typically find wolves are dominant competitors to cougars. We examined single-species, single-season occupancy models and co-occurrence models of wolves and cougars in the Central Canadian Rocky Mountains to understand interactions between these two species on a grand landscape. Data was collected from 2012-2013 using remote wildlife cameras and separated into seasons. Naïve occupancy estimates were larger for wolves in both seasons, but both species had smaller ranges in winter. There were …